What’s the likely outcome of the US-Russia accord on Syria’s chemical arsenal? Look no further than what happened to UN Resolution 1701 of seven years ago. That resolution, which ended the Second Lebanon War and which purportedly eliminated Hezbollah’s missile armories, is a mirror image of the non-disarmament-to-come.

It is also Tzipi Livni’s self-proclaimed crowning achievement during her stint as then-PM Ehud Olmert’s foreign minister. To any visitor from Mars who may be uninformed, self-same Livni is currently in charge of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

Resolution 1701 is a sad object lesson about the immoral malfunction of high-minded international agreements to destroy dangerous weapons stockpiles. The Syrian counterpart may not evolve in identical patterns but its inevitable bottom line will be no different than that of the dismal gag that Resolution 1701 turned out to be. Continue reading →

Time was when sensible folks truly believed that if you venture too far, you’ll fall off Earth’s jagged edge into the endless void below. That was the majority view, the widely-accepted and fundamentally unquestioned conventional wisdom.

By today, though, one would assume that nobody swallows that any more, certainly not in the erudite parts of what we’ve for centuries recognized as our globe.

Welcome to the International Flat Earth Society, now largely California-based (where else?). You think IFES-members are crazy? You’d be surprised to learn that they’ve diagnosed the rest of us as profoundly insane for not grasping reality as they know we should.

They reject as counterfeits all compelling scientific data. These, they insist, are elaborate deceptions cynically perpetrated on humanity – for inexplicable purposes – by successive US administrations via their principal charlatan agency, NASA.

This isn’t a joke. The flat-Earthers are real and they are dead-earnest. No amount of proof will sway them – like no amount of proof sways our inveterate Osloites.  Continue reading →

Around our troubled planet, constructing an apartment for a Jewish family in a vibrant veteran Jewish neighborhood – an indivisible part and parcel of the Jewish state’s capital – is decried as an unpardonable a sin against all the kind-heartedness and fair-mindedness that the international community purports to effuse.

This isn’t just the clichéd consensus of conformist correspondents and stale statesmen overseas. Sunshine friends too can’t resist the warm ambiance of group-think.

Irish filmmaker Nicky Larkin, for example, was feted here for his seemingly maverick pro-Israel stance. But now he finds that “increasingly difficult” because he “can’t accept the expansion of settlements on land the international community considers illegal, under the Fourth Geneva Convention.” In an op-ed for The Irish Independent, he just about equates settlement with suicide-bombing. Continue reading →

Jewish culpability always was – and apparently still remains – a key element in lending moral authority to any contentious cause.  Jews have known this for millennia but the dispiriting fact of our existence is that it still goes on, unabated, in the 21st century and that it motivates not only declared and implacable enemies but also forces of supposed enlightenment and liberality in the West.

As it was from time immemorial – it’s just not a marketable story without that eminently salient Jewish connection.

The blood-soaked internecine turmoil convulsing the Arab realm – from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia – has nothing to do with Jews, with Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement or with Israel, the Jewish state. The carnage is spawned by internal Arab ethnic, religious, clannish and political conflicts. Each side reinforces its case by recruiting throngs of volatile and violent demonstrators. This rent-a-mob fest is palmed off to clueless foreigners as democracy-in-action. Continue reading →

Was it really meaningless coincidence that just as an alarmed American administration closed down some 20 embassies throughout the Mideast – including the one in hardly unfriendly Tel Aviv – Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan delivered his opening court-martial statement?

Although superficially unconnected, these events are inextricably linked. Both expose the shoddy sham that US President Barack Obama struts out as enlightened policy. This should send cold shivers down the spines of those hoodwinked Israelis who still think Obama deserves even a modicum of our trust, to say nothing of actual sacrifice.

Hasan’s coldblooded murder in 2009 of 13 and the wounding of a further 32 underscores Obama’s obsessive obfuscation.

As Hasan callously mowed down fellow servicemen, he yelled Allahu Akhbar (God is great). It later transpired that long before Hasan launched his attack, the Joint Terrorism Task Force was aware that he maintained steady contact with terror mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki, inquiring, among others, about religious martyrdom. But forewarned isn’t necessarily forearmed. Following whatever logic, the authorities preferred to do nothing. Continue reading →